What The Heck Is The Trans-Pacific Partnership And Why Should You Care?

The TPP is the largest proposed free trade agreement deal in history, representing close to 40 percent of the world’s economy. The negotiations have been ongoing for several years and now involve 12 nations, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Chile, New Zealand and Australia, among others. The secrecy of the deal-making has been strict, with the little information available mostly coming from WikiLeaks, which released portions of the draft proposal last year.

According to Joshua Meltzer, a fellow in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, secrecy is typical when governments are working out trade agreements, but he believes they are getting close to inking the deal.

“I think they are close. I think they’re down to the traditionally hard issues – they’ve identified the issues that would require high-level political attention,” says Meltzer, who is also an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

“This not only damages health when good public policies are taken away, but it often deters governments from enacting new policies for fear of litigation,” says Hirono.

Katie Hirono, a researcher at the University of New South Wales’ Centre for Health Equity, Training, Research and Evaluation, says while “it’s understandable that negotiators need some level of discretion in developing an agreement, without involvement of outside experts and some level of transparency on the potential impacts of the trade agreement, there’s no way for governments to guarantee that these agreements won’t negatively impact people.”

She says the “scale and complexity” of the agreement, and the fact that the commitments are binding, requires “meticulous and detailed analysis by health experts.”

Hirono was involved in putting together a report on the agreement’s possible health impacts on the Australian populace that was based, in part, on the leaked portions of the TPP.

The report, “Negotiating Healthy Trade in Australia: A Health Impact Assessment of the Proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement,” found that the TPP has the potential to increase the cost of medicines in the member countries outside the U.S., prevent the U.S. from implementing reforms to make medications more affordable, and could negatively impact participating nations’ domestic policies.

According to Hirono, the U.S. has some of the strongest policies related to intellectual property in the world, and imposing U.S. standards in countries with different intellectual property rules “could significantly change the affordability of medications in those countries, as well as locking in current arrangements that keep prices high in the U.S.”

“What this means for medicine is that it takes longer for cheaper generic medications to enter the market, keeping costs higher for patients for longer,” Hirono said in an email.

Additionally, there are provisions that would allow foreign investors to sue governments of another country when they believe there has been a violation of their property rights, meaning “public policies that are good for health,” such as improved nutrition labeling on food, restrictions on alcohol and health warnings on tobacco products could be challenged by companies under the TPP.

“This not only damages health when good public policies are taken away, but it often deters governments from enacting new policies for fear of litigation,” says Hirono.

Meltzer argues that it’s too soon to conclude that these provisions will end up in the final agreement.

“We will have to see what the final text is, what the final deal is,” he said recently in a phone interview with Modern Farmer. “I’m confident what we will see is that these things will not bear out. These concerns people always have when it comes to free trade agreements almost always have been unfounded. In many respects, this agreement is going to be about improving a whole range of standards across the board that is actually going to make it easier for governments to achieve the types of goals that are important to them.”

Meltzer says passing the TPP would improve America’s market access to exports, especially with Japan, which currently has no free trade agreement with the U.S., and would be positive for U.S. agriculture.

“It’s also going to be an opportunity for the U.S. to [see] growth and economic development and to set the rules on key 21st century issues, such as data flows and supply chains,” he says.

He points to a chapter on the environment that he says will deal with illegal logging, fisheries management and a host of other issues as another positive aspect of the TPP.

“From what we can tell, it’s a very ambitious chapter that will, based on previous trade agreements involving the U.S., have commitments to maintain and enforce a range of environmental [issues],” says Meltzer.

While the Australian report solely addresses health impacts, Hirono says its authors are concerned about “the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism and the lever this provides to corporations to challenge environmental policies” in the member countries. She says a leaked draft of the chapter “suggests the TPP lacks strong enforceable protections for the environment, while on the other hand, it provides this mechanism for corporations to contest efforts to regulate their activities.”

In regard to Australia’s farming sector, Hirono and her colleagues are “skeptical about claims that the TPP will create a lot of new export opportunities for agriculture.” She points to her country’s experience with the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which she says is “widely acknowledged to have been disappointing. From what we’ve seen so far, it appears the TPP is much more about standardizing and harmonizing regulation across the participating countries than it is about traditional trade issues. And it’s the constraints on governments’ ability to regulate that we’re concerned about. The health, social and environmental costs may end up outweighing any gains in other sectors.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Barack Obama and some members of Congress are pushing to “fast track” the deal when it’s finally inked, a process last used with 1994’s North American Free Trade Agreement. The process cuts short debate and curtails possible amendments.

Back in the early 90s, when NAFTA was being hashed out between the U.S., Mexico and Canada, there were similar concerns as those being expressed about the TPP, with many of those fears not coming to pass. One result that did have unforeseen negative environmental effects was something called Chapter 11, in which a foreign company can sue a nation if a new environmental rule or law hurts their business. Another impact of NAFTA was the increase in American consumption of produce from abroad. Americans now consume twice as much fruit, and three times as many vegetables, from Mexico and Canada as they did before NAFTA, according to a United States Department of Agriculture report. During that same period, Mexico has been inundated with American processed foods.

NAFTA may provide some clues to what could be expected from this newest trade agreement, but they are two very different animals. The world will have to wait with bated breath to see what the final agreement looks like and what could be in store for the 792 million people who will be affected by what it contains.